Moria eyed the small semi-translucent blue box at the side of her vision yet again. If she had her way, she would take a few months to mull over this decision, but she also knew that it would not change how she felt about becoming a Goddess.

She very much wanted to, but she also knew that she could not do what was required to get her kind back on the right track. The years of corruption that the Elder Gods had spread would take even longer to undo — if she could even get rid of it all.

Someone would have to do it, and at the moment, she could not trust anyone but herself. She brushed away a perceived wrinkle in one of the cloths she had used to cover her former comrades. After a moment, she paused, balled her hand into a fist and shook her head.

"You seem to have made up your mind," Neria said as she placed sheathed falchions next to the last council members. "Do I call you Goddess or Mother now?"

"You call me whatever you wish to," Moria replied. "I am still — and will always be — your mother." She shook her head, her ears twitching slightly. "Besides, I am still not sure. I don't think I can do what needs to be done."

"And what would that be?"

"Killing, or at least incapacitating, quite a few of our kind. At least every leader of the churches devoted to the Elder Gods, as well as the few officials they have in their pockets."

Neria simply looked at her mother for a moment before she gave a dry laugh. "And why would that be a problem? They made their choice when they stuck to those ideals after the literal creator told them that that is a no-go," she scoffed. "Even if it is a bit hypocritical of her. She controls all of us with the System, after all."

"Not really," Moria said with a light shake of her head. "It's a part of her, yes, but she doesn't actually consciously control it. A long time ago, she tried to explain it to me, but I only understood a little bit of it." She took a breath and set her gaze squarely on her daughter. "In essence, the System is supposed to act as a buffer between Aperio and her creation. Back then, a stray thought from her could change reality without her really wanting to have done it. I am sure she can still change things, but every interaction she has with the world at large seems to be much more deliberate now.

"In any case," she continued, "the System might be 'Aperio' in a sense, but it acts on its own logic. Think of it like a very large and very, very complex ward. Seeing it will give you a headache, but it's made from countless runes that are somehow able to process the information a Soul carries and act according to it."

"So, it's more like we influence ourselves? Like a kind of feedback loop?"

Moria nodded. "Exactly. That's why the System will give you a magic-aligned Class if you practice a lot of magic and then get more specific the more evolutions you go through. Aperio herself has nothing to do with that; she simply made the System and provides it with the mana it needs to run."

Her daughter remained quiet for a moment, her gaze shifting from her mother to the covered corpses on the ground. "I know that the Gods she killed tried to mess with Souls, but did they also try to get her System to work for them?"

"Perhaps," Moria replied with a shrug. "But given what I understood of her explanation back then, someone else taking control of the System wouldn't really work. The Classes went away, but that was because Aperio was gone." She paused for a moment before adding, "At least, I think that is the case."

"But why would she let them break? Does she have to walk around on Verenier for them to work?"

"Ah, no," Moria said. She sighed. "Aperio will tell you what happened, if she so chooses. I will not break the trust she placed in me."

"I am your daughter," Neria said, her voice a few octaves higher and just below yelling. "Why do you always keep secrets?!"

"The secrets I keep from you are not mine to tell," Moria replied, her voice calm and measured as she stood up and regarded the covered corpses before her one last time before turning around. "You have secrets you do not wish to tell me either, and that is fine. We do not need to know everything, but we do need to be able to trust one another." She looked at her daughter — taking in the golden fur that never, through all her lives, had graced her. "Do you trust me?"

Neria remained quiet for a while, her eyes wandering around the room but always pausing on her mother's form. She began to speak more than a few times but always stopped again, seemingly unsure if her words were correct or not. In the end, her gaze stopped on Moria, her ears twitching.

"I do," she finally said. "I know that you want to protect me." She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. "But these secrets — especially if they concern the All-Mother — are driving me insane. When I first met her, she almost crushed me in a hug. She seemed lost; definitely not like the creator of everything.

"And now," she continued, "she walks around, killing hundreds of Gods like it's nothing and — for reasons I still don't understand — is helping you deal with this and wants you to become a Goddess." She turned around and shook her head. "I'm sorry, but all of that is a bit… much."

Moria gave her daughter a bitter smile before she started to walk towards the exit of the council chambers. "It only gets worse the more you know."

///

Jester let the rose fall from his hand and into the open casket that was supposed to house his mother. The flower settled against the inlay, rolling slightly to the side as there was no body for it to rest against.

Silently, he took a step to the side and placed the other rose he carried between his father’s cold, stiff hands. In the span of a few days he had lost both his parents. One had been planned, the other not.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Perhaps it would turn out to be a blessing in disguise later on, but for now Jester would have to play his part as the mourning son. Sure, there was a bit of genuine sadness at the loss of his mother, but it was fleeting at best. Jester's relationship to his parents had never been what others would consider good. Still, despite most of that being public knowledge — and the truth for most noble houses — he was still expected to mourn the loss of his parents. Something that put a damper on his plans for a little while.

Jester remained standing for a moment longer before he stepped back and took a seat on the bench closest to the caskets. Nobody else would sit with him as he was the only one of the Vinmaier family in attendance; this bench was reserved for family. He did not even have Lita with him; he had sent her into hiding as the All-Mother had somehow missed her and he did want to keep her. In order to do that, however, he would have to figure out a way to remove the enchantment from her flesh. Something that he hoped would cause the All-Mother to overlook her again. If she is just loyal, that's her choice after all.

He had little doubt that Lita would continue to stay by his side even if the magical enforcement went away. She had been under its influence since she was born — almost twenty-three years now — and most of the time he did not make use of the enchantment for her to obey him. If anything, she forced the slavery magic to act on her own accord, seemingly enjoying it. Even more so whenever he told her to share his bed.

As the priest — still wearing his now-meaningless robes and symbols — stepped onto the stage that housed the caskets of his parents, Jester sighed. For now, he would have to play the sad child. The idiot fool.

///

Aperio tilted her head at the clothes Adam had laid out on his bed. "And this is what they wear on Earth?" She picked up the shirt and took a closer look at the people on it. "Are they famous?"

The shirt Adam had worn upon arrival in Verenier was black with six vaguely Human looking people on it, all of them wearing rather comical clothes. "And why is one of them green? I thought Earth only had Humans."

"I'd guess they are fictional," Ferio said as she looked over her kneeling mother's shoulder at the article of clothing. "Probably some good old hero thing for kids. They all wear easily recognisable uniforms, after all."

"Good old hero thing?" Aperio asked, turning her head and looking at her daughter. "I have never heard about anything like this."

"Ah, well," Ferio began, "it's not something from Verenier, but a few of the other worlds I have followers on. Some of them are less magically inclined and have taken to prescribing their spells to some inborn 'superpower'. Rather hilarious to listen to, if you ask me."

"She's right," Adam said. "They're all fictional, part of an interconnected universe of different stories. You can read the stories when you are on Earth." He cleared his throat as the All-Mother twisted herself a little further and looked at him. "If you want to, that is."

"I might do that," Aperio replied, setting her gaze back on the shirt and holding it for a moment longer before placing it back on the bed next to the other pieces Adam had worn when he had come to Verenier. "But I also know that I will stick to my dress. They can think what they want of me, but I like it more than any of this."

She would stand out regardless of what she wore. According to Adam, she would be a rarity on Earth, even if one disregarded the ears she would also be keeping. For a brief moment, she had half considered tricking the minds of anyone that passed to simply ignore her ears, but that was already a step too far for her. The other option was to use her magic in another way to trick the eye of mortals, something much more manageable but also something she was not sure how to do. It had worked well enough for hiding Caethya and herself from prying eyes back in Foderys, but making it work only on their ears seemed more troublesome. And I don’t even know if it would look right…

The simplest solution was to simply want to hide her ears, but that could lead to her body changing, her magic influencing others, or her magic concealing her in a way she found unacceptable. All in all, something she was not willing to try as long as other methods were available.

"Like I said, you can do that. Would be even better if Caethya also wears clothes similar to yours, then." He closed his eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Many people would still give you weird looks, but pretending to be someone else like that is not that uncommon. Especially in bigger cities."

The All-Mother stood up to her full height and shrugged. "You still have time to prepare. And the option to not go is open until we actually arrive on Earth." She stretched her wings slightly, the room not allowing for much. "I am sure we can manage on our own if need be."

"I am sure that lots of people will try to capture you as soon as they figure out even a fraction of what you can do." He held up his hand to postpone Aperio's inevitable reply. "I know that nobody there can do anything to you, but I fear for what you might do to them."

"I would defend myself," Aperio replied. "But that is all I would do. I doubt that is too excessive."

"He's concerned because his world is weaker than Verenier and you can break anything here already," Ferio said with a slight shake of her head. "I am pretty sure that is not an issue."

"It is not," Aperio agreed, frowning slightly. "I am perfectly capable of not breaking things." Now if only I could understand this stupid [Translation] skill…

No matter how hard she looked or how she poked at it, the skill did not make sense to her. It translated languages for the user — both what they said and what they heard — but most of the runes that made up the thing dealt with intent and telepathy rather than knowledge or even language. Almost like it just creates the illusion of speech and puts his words in people's minds.

She knew that that could not be the way it worked, however, as she knew what telepathy looked and felt like and Adam was not doing that. He just spoke, his body causing the air to vibrate and her ears to somehow decipher that. Language is weird. That was the only thing Aperio learned from her attempts. A fact that was obvious to anyone.

Aperio tilted her head as a distant, quiet prayer from Moria nudged against the edges of her mind. Her friend had come to a decision and wished to speak. "Moria is ready," she said as a thought first informed her love and then brought Caethya next to her. She looked at her daughter, the smiling face of Ferio causing a small note of happiness to ring through her mind and a subtle warmth to spread through her. "Do you wish to join us?"

Ferio’s smile widened almost imperceptibly. "I would love to! It's been too long since I have seen Moria."